Wallace Baine, Baine Street: The children aren't our future ... young adults are

Some time next month, my age will nose past the average life expectancy in Uganda -- and yes, there will be a cake. After that, I'm coming after you, Burkina Faso.

The list of life expectancy by nation, as chronicled by the United Nations, is, in fact, my new yardstick to measure between young and old. At the bottom of the list is Mozambique at 39.2 years. If you've reached that age, you must now live with the awful knowledge that in at least one place on this beautiful Earth, you should by the law of averages be dead.

Congratulations, you are now old.

It's not so bad, being old. But one thing we old people tend to forget is that once you're old, the future doesn't really belong to you anymore. That's hard to swallow, particularly with the current generation of the newly old, the baby boomers and Generation X-ers who are used to thinking of themselves as forever young -- cue the Bob Dylan song.

Despite what the late Whitney Houston sang, the children aren't necessarily our future. The future is a lot more immediate than that. The crucial generation of Americans, in fact, is not today's grade-schoolers, but the young adults, the late teens and 20-somethings now graduating from our high schools and colleges, or just having done in the past few years.

This election year, I decided I was going to vote as if I were 22. No, that doesn't mean I slept in until noon, and rolled into the election booth rockin' Arcade Fire on my Droid -- I was up at 11 and it was Roxy Music on my iPhone. The point is, how this demographic group we call the "millennials" navigates the next decade is going to decide the long-term future of this vainglorious experiment we call "America."

Boomers have been prattling on for decades how special their generation is, having been forged through the crucible of Vietnam and Watergate. To millennials, that's just a bunch of yadda yadda. Consider the unique standing of today's young people. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are ancient history to them. Nixon? Reagan? Weren't they pals of Teddy Roosevelt?

This is the generation that were children when the Towers went down in New York and thus had to process all the madness of a post-9/11 world during their formative years. And they are the first "native" generation of the Internet, never having known life without it. These are people who swim in the technology that us older folks are often scared of drowning in.

This kind of childhood -- qualitatively different from the childhood of older generations -- should have turned these millennials into a workforce of extraordinary talent and dexterity.

But what have we delivered to them? While the rest of us have been otherwise engaged in a bloody red state/blue state bar fight, young people are faced with an increasingly brutal Darwinian struggle for college admission only to have to climb over each other to land unpaid internships. No wonder, they seem so aimless to older people; they're being brutalized by an economy that has turned its back on them.

On top of that, this generation has been relentlessly stereotyped by its elders, as silly, dreamy-eyed Obama-philes who can't get it together to move out of their parents' basements, or as snarky pretenders permanently attached to their ear buds who spend all their time trolling Reddit or growing hipster beards.

In fact, this generation is an ongoing living social experiment in ways that previous generations were not. They are marrying and having children much later than older generations. And though extended adolescence is something that boomers and GenX-ers are experienced with, it's become a norm with today's young adults.

This is the first generation to which homosexuality is an accepted part of mainstream life -- mostly, anyway. It's also a group of people to whom race is an incidental and not definitive factor in one's relationship and job prospects -- again, for the most part.

This generation is even making social scientists consider the twenties as a wholly separate stage of life, a transition from adolescence to full-fledged adulthood. These guys and gals are creating whole new categories of life experience.

And yet, these days, almost every comment on what the future of America is going to look like has to do with the demographic changes pitting growing Latino populations against diminishing Anglo populations at the expense of the Republican Party. We're missing the obvious here, folks. If you want to know what America will look like in the near-term future, cast your eyes to the generation of 20-somethings we're now ignoring.

Many industries across the economic spectrum -- including the one I'm in -- have lamented the fact that young people no longer seem interested in the product they're selling. But where is the effort to figure out this demographic? Why are we so content to dismiss them as the illegal-download generation?

So, maybe a Manhattan Project aimed at getting young adults on a better footing to take on the future is not in the cards. But the next time we trot out that old "children-are-our-future" platitude, remember that those children are the ones moving back in with their parents after finding out the world has no room for them.

We've thrown them into a sink-or-swim environment, and they're doing neither. They've learned to float.